Automatic control method of generating sub-systems and sub-system arbitration from the deconstruction of a complex equipment graph

ABSTRACT

Disclosed is a method of organizing automatic control in automation systems from a system description, using deconstruction of complex equipment graphs.

FIELD

The present disclosure relates to control of building systems using automated means. More specifically, the present disclosure relates to an automated method of deconstructing a graph representing building systems equipment and connections into sub-systems. The present disclosure particularly addresses the control and automation of HVAC, energy, lighting, irrigation systems, and the like.

BACKGROUND

Modern buildings contain a varied and complex set of systems for managing and maintaining the building environment. Building automation systems are used to automate the control of many separate systems, such as those used for lighting, climate, security, entertainment, etc. Building automation systems can perform a number of functions, such as automation of equipment scheduling, monitoring of various building parameters, optimization of resource consumption, event or alarm reporting and handling, and many others.

Building automation system implementation requires programmatic understanding of what equipment is available to the building automation system and how that equipment may be utilized. For example, the building automation system needs to account for information such as what equipment can be run simultaneously, what groups of equipment work together to achieve a particular objective, etc. Automatic discovery of this information is challenging with current methodologies.

SUMMARY

The present disclosure provides a method of automatically decomposing a complex graph of connected equipment into equipment sub-systems for the purpose of automatic labeling of automatable systems, sub-system, and the equipment therein for machine-driven control. Further the present disclosure relates to user interfaces that allow a user to draw a graph of equipment having n-complexity and n-number of routing paths, and decompose that drawing into a controllable system of atomic sub-systems automatically.

The present disclosure describes a method for the decomposition of sub-systems to automatically infer controllability, ranking, prioritization, and analyzing the sub-systems to identify those that are unique and complete, categorizing sub-systems into synchronous groups (in which only a single sub-system can operate at a time), and asynchronous groups (in which more than one sub-system can operate simultaneously).

The present disclosure details how building automation system would automatically provide semantic labeling for the sub-system and its equipment for retrieval during an analytic stage.

The present disclosure also relates to the automatic reduction of state space in a n-complexity graph of equipment. By using the semantic labeling together with the deconstructed set of meaningful sub-systems, the meaningful control state space of the system can be derived.

There has thus been outlined, rather broadly, the features of the disclosure in order that the detailed description thereof that follows may be better understood and in order that the present contribution to the art may be better appreciated.

Numerous objects, features and advantages of the present disclosure will be readily apparent to those of ordinary skill in the art upon a reading of the following detailed description of presently preferred, but nonetheless illustrative, embodiments of the present disclosure when taken in conjunction with the accompanying drawings. The disclosure is capable of other embodiments and of being practiced and carried out in various ways. Also, it is to be understood that the phraseology and terminology employed herein are for the purpose of descriptions and should not be regarded as limiting.

Although specific embodiments have been illustrated and described herein, it will be appreciated by those of ordinary skill in the art that any arrangement, which is calculated to achieve the same purpose, may be substituted for the specific embodiment shown. This application is intended to cover any adaptions or variations of the present disclosure.

This section summarizes some aspects of the present disclosure and briefly introduces some preferred embodiments. Simplifications or omissions in this section as well as in the abstract or the title of this description may be made to avoid obscuring the purpose of this section, the abstract, and the title. Such simplifications or omissions are not intended to limit the scope of the present disclosure nor imply any limitations.

Several advantages of one or more aspects of the present disclosure include but are not limited to: to generate a system control scheme automatically from a complex equipment graph; to decompose automatically the equipment graph into sub-system sets, where the decomposition enables the generation of a system control scheme; to enable automatic semantic reasoning about the generation of said system control scheme from the decomposition, thereby enabling more efficient generation of the control scheme as well as increasing human reasoning of the control scheme generation process; to automatically select valid and unique equipment sub-systems from said decomposition, thereby reducing the control scheme search space so as to increase control path search efficiency; to enable automatic prioritization of sub-systems, thereby enabling the generation of a system control scheme that responds to system preferences and priorities; to classify automatically sub-systems as either asynchronous or synchronous, thereby enabling the generation of a control scheme that responds to precedence and sequential operation limitations of particular equipment and sets of equipment. Other advantages of one or more aspects of the disclosed method will be apparent from consideration of the following drawings and description.

DESCRIPTION OF DRAWINGS

To further clarify various aspects of some example embodiments of the present disclosure, a more particular description of the disclosure will be rendered by reference to specific embodiments thereof that are illustrated in the appended drawings. It is appreciated that the drawings depict only illustrated embodiments of the disclosure and are therefore not to be considered limiting of its scope. The disclosure will be described and explained with additional specificity and detail through the use of the accompanying drawings in which:

FIG. 1 Base sub-system structure

FIG. 2 Transport class detail

FIG. 3 An example system model

FIG. 4 Permutations of the example system model

FIG. 5 Example system model with sub-system overlay

FIG. 6 Decomposition of example system model classification into groups

FIG. 7 Decomposition of an arbitrary system into groups with priorities

FIG. 8 Graphical user interface and deconstructed sub-system graph

FIG. 9 An embodiment of a graphical user interface drawing device

FIG. 10 An embodiment of semantic analytics

REFERENCE NUMERALS

The following conventions are used for reference numerals: the first digit indicates the figure in which the numbered part first appears (the first two digits are used for the figure number when required). The remaining digits are used to identify the part in the drawing.

-   301 solar thermal hot water panel -   302 heating source -   303 transport -   304 transport -   305 store (virtual heat source) -   306 mixer -   307 transport -   308 load/system head -   309 router -   310 router -   311 cooling source -   401 valid sub-system column -   402 invalid sub-system column -   403 duplicate sub-system column -   501 sub-system 1 -   502 sub-system 2 -   503 sub-system 3 -   504 sub-system 4 -   505 sub-system 5

DESCRIPTION

The embodiments of the present disclosure described below are not intended to be exhaustive or to limit the disclosure to the precise forms disclosed in the following detailed description. Rather, the embodiments are chosen and described so that others skilled in the art may appreciate and understand the principles and practices of the present disclosure.

The following embodiments and the accompanying drawings, which are incorporated into and form part of this disclosure, illustrate embodiments of the disclosure and together with the description, serve to explain the principles of the disclosure. To the accomplishment of the foregoing and related ends, certain illustrative aspects of the disclosure are described herein in connection with the following description and the annexed drawings. These aspects are indicative, however of, but a few of the various ways in which the principles of the disclosure can be employed and the subject disclosure is intended to include all such aspects and their equivalents. Other advantages and novel features of the disclosure will become apparent from the following detailed description of the disclosure when considered in conjunction with the drawings.

Explanation will be made below with reference to the aforementioned figures for illustrative embodiments concerning the present invention.

The present disclosure describes a method of decomposing a system of interconnected equipment into various sets of equipment comprising various sub-systems. The basic structure of such a sub-system is shown in Error! Reference source not found. A sub-system comprises: an input, or a source of the relevant resource; a transport, whereby said relevant resource is transported; and an output, or sink of said relevant resource. For example, in one embodiment, a sub-system may have as an input a heating source, a water pump as a transport, and an output of a hot water storage tank. The transport moves water from the heating source to the output hot water storage tank.

In various embodiments, an equipment sub-system transport may use various means. As shown in Error! Reference source not found, in one embodiment, the transport may be controlled and either looped or non-looped; or passive, and may use either convection or line-pressure as a means of transport. The transport element of a sub-system may consist of one or multiple transport devices.

Error! Reference source not found, shows an example embodiment of a graphical representation of a system of interconnected equipment. In this embodiment, the load/system head 308 connects via transport 307 into store 305. From the store 305, transport paths exist to a cooling source 311 or to load 308, via mixer 306. The illustrated system also contains loops between store 305 through heating source 302 with an explicit transport 303, as well as between store 305 and solar thermal hot-water panel 301 with an explicit transport 304.

A sub-system is classified as synchronous when said sub-system routing paths are conjoined in an manner that only one sub-system may operate at a time; and a sub-system is classified as asynchronous when said sub-system routing paths are conjoined in a manner that two or more sub-systems may operate at the same time.

The decomposition process of a system may be accomplished by recognizing and extracting sub-systems from the system graph. Sub-system reduction to atomic sub-systems having a known equipment topology enable a machine learning engine to reason about the system and control the system in a uniform expected manner. (Error! Reference source not found.). A sub-system may be defined as starting at a source and ending at a sink. Resources are capable of supplying one or multiple sinks. Transports may split into multiple paths to other transports or multiple outputs and each path may be identified as a branch. Branches may be classified into one or multiple synchronous or asynchronous sub-systems. The process may also enforce specified design rules for sub-system and component recognition and extraction.

The decomposition process may also recognize characteristics of or relationships between sub-systems, such as deriving sub-system or branch type. The process may identify the sub-system as either synchronous or asynchronous based on the equipment and sub-system characteristics and capabilities. The process may also identify sub-systems with attributes like priority and precedence. For example, sub-systems may be organized in asynchronous and synchronous groups.

The process may also organize the whole deconstructed graph of systems, sub-systems, and equipment into structured maps, trees, or sets which can represent unions based on asynchronous and synchronous groups, or other characteristics.

Application of the methodology may yield sets of equipment that constitute the various sub-systems in the given system. Error! Reference source not found. illustrates some of the equipment sub-systems that may be recognized, analyzed, and derived using the method described above from the example system in Error! Reference source not found. (note that not all possible sub-systems are shown, for ease of illustration and readability). Individual pieces of equipment are represented as circles, containing the reference numeral of the corresponding piece of equipment. An individual sub-system is represented by a column of equipment pieces. Sub-systems that are not faded or crossed out, such as 401, are those sub-systems resulting from the decomposition process that are both unique and complete. Sub-systems that are faded and crossed out with a solid line, such as 402, are those sub-systems that were identified in the decomposition process as being incomplete, for example, not having the required equipment as required in Error! Reference source not found. Sub-systems that are faded and crossed out with a dashed line, such as 403, are those sub-systems that were identified in the decomposition process as a duplicate system.

Having executed the decomposition process, the sub-systems comprising a particular system may be classified. Error! Reference source not found. shows the example system from Error! Reference source not found. with all complete and unique sub-systems 501-505 overlaid on the system diagram.

As part of the decomposition process, sub-systems may be classified as either asynchronous or synchronous, Error! Reference source not found. illustrates how the five unique, complete subsystems derived from the whole system illustrated in Error! Reference source not found. are classified. As shown, sub-systems 501 and 502 are asynchronous, and may be run simultaneously. Sub-systems 503, 504, and 505 are synchronous and must be run one at a time.

A controlled system may have any number of groups of sub-systems representing any number and variety of characteristics. An illustration of one embodiment of how equipment sub-systems may be grouped and classified is shown in Error! Reference source not found. A Sub-system may belong to one or multiple groups. For example, in the embodiment illustrated in FIG. 7 sub-system 2 belongs to both an asynchronous group and a synchronous group.

A controlled system having multiple sub-systems can further be deconstructed in such a way that the equipment or system states required to initialize the sub-system are pre-computed. An embodiment is shown in FIG. 5, where the path routing devices 310, 306, 309 (in this case valves) are pre-computed for each of the 5 sub-systems shown, reducing the managed state space. A controller thus knows the necessary starting state before preforming a control action heuristic on the remaining and smaller state space.

Another embodiment of the present disclosure is for the purpose of semantic extraction. By decomposing systems into atomic sub-systems comprising the necessary components of source, sink, and transport, a control system may automatically control and manage these system components in a rule-based way. The controller may also apply meaning to a sub-system by means of classification or rule tables. These classifications and/or rules may be used to generate semantics for the system, the sub-systems, and the constituent parts. An embodiment can be seen in FIG. 5, wherein sub-system 501 may be labeled as a “solar sub-system” based on the resource of its source component. In another embodiment, the same sub-system may be labeled as a “heat-to-storage” system classification, based on its producer consumer purpose. In another embodiment, it may be labeled as a “heating system”, based on the classification of its sub-system. Many embodiments of semantic labeling are possible given a rule-based deconstruction of atomic sub-systems from a graph.

A graphical user interface may be used to input or drive the creation of an equipment graph, such that an electronic device having a screen may be used to automatically deconstruct a controllable system from the graphical representation of the controllable system, the equipment objects, sets, priority, and their relationships. An embodiment of such a device can be seen in FIG. 8. Other methods may be used, such as importing a HVAC, mechanical, architectural, and/or engineering drawings or files.

In some graphical user interface embodiments having an electronic display, a user may drag and drop or instantiate equipment objects from a library into a drawing screen, either on a touchscreen, cursor driven input device, or other means. An embodiment can be seen in FIG. 9. Or the user can also create new equipment objects through drawing from fundamentals.

These drawings, made in situ or a-priori, can be disaggregated using the above methods into a graph of sub-systems, priority, sub-system synchronicity, labeling, and the underlying control knowledge required to control the system in an unsupervised manner. An embodiment can be seen in FIG. 8, showing a hierarchal graph of sub-systems.

These deconstructed graphs of sub-system and their semantic labeling can be used to generate automatic analytics as in the embodiment in FIG. 10. In some embodiments the graphical display of equipment state and sensor values may be graphed in a time series labeled from the automated semantic extraction from the sub-systems. Some embodiments of semantic labeling may take the form of a sub-system labeling by system purpose. In some embodiments, the system purpose may be extracted from its source equipment label, source-sink label, source-transport-sink label, the classified family of sub-system defined by those atomic attributes, and/or any other extracted attributes, labels, classifications, or other identifiers of its constituent equipment.

In some embodiments, the sub-system semantics may provide analytic display or graph grouping of equipment automatically, as in the embodiment in FIG. 10. In addition, as is shown in FIG. 10 such automatic labeling can correlate equipment actions and system actions with the corresponding sub-system without requiring manual programming.

The foregoing disclosure describes some possible embodiments of this invention, with no indication of preference to the particular embodiment. A skilled practitioner of the art will find alternative embodiments readily apparent from the previous drawings and discussion and will acknowledge that various modifications can be made without departure from the scope of the invention disclosed herein. 

What is claimed is:
 1. A method of automatically generating a system control scheme from the deconstruction of an equipment graph into controllable sets of prioritized sub-systems, wherein said equipment graph comprises one or more sub-systems of equipment; and wherein: said sub-systems comprise a unique routing path through said equipment graph; and said sub-systems comprise the ability to be actuated; and whereby: said sub-systems are divided into groups of sub-system sets; and said sub-system sets may be classified as synchronous sets or asynchronous sets; and wherein said sub-system set groupings are created for each conjoined routing path of parallel sub-systems.
 2. The equipment sets of claim 1, wherein the sub-systems are given a priority.
 3. The priority of claim 2, wherein sub-systems of synchronous groups are ranked for control precedence by said priority.
 4. The equipment sets of claim 1, wherein the sub-system sets may form unions between said sub-system sets whereby one or more pieces of equipment is shared between multiple sets.
 5. The equipment sets of claim 1, whereby said equipment may be classed individually as a source, a sink, or a transport, wherein: said source is comprised of a least one resource source; and said sink is comprised of a least one resource sink; and said transport is comprised of a least one means of resource transport; and wherein said transport is interposed between said source and said sink, such that it forms a sub-system that may be actuated.
 6. The source of claim 5, wherein the said source comprises one or more of but is not limited to: utility generated electricity, site generated electricity, boiler, steam generator, gas turbine, gas heater, chiller, heat pump, adsorption heat pump, ground source heat pump, furnace, air conditioner, photovoltaics, solar hot water collector, wind turbine, hydro turbine, liquid or solid thermal storage tanks, mass thermal storage well, thermal electric generators including pettier junctions, carnot cycle engines, and/or water sources of irrigation.
 7. The sink of claim 5, wherein said sink comprises of one or more of but is not limited to: buildings, building zones, building surfaces, building surface interlayers, electric batteries, electric loads, outdoor surfaces including snow melt surfaces, irrigation consuming masses, HVAC system equipment, functional control equipment, lights, motors, liquid or solid thermal storage tanks, mass thermal storage, and/or phase change materials.
 8. The transport of claim 5, wherein said transport comprises of one or more of but is not limited to: pumps, fans, air handlers, dampers, valves, inverters, relays, actuators, linear divers, electromagnets, solenoids, switches, wires, and/or pipes.
 9. The resource of claim 5, wherein said resource may comprise one or more of but is not limited to: environmental, liquid, thermal, electrical, and/or energy resource.
 10. A building automation device comprising: a building system equipment graph; and a memory; and a processor operatively coupled to the memory and configured to execute program code stored in the memory to: receive a building system equipment graph; analyze the building system equipment graph to identify the unique sub-systems of the graph having a unique routing path; determine the uniquely controllable sub-systems of the graph of said equipment graph; classify sub-systems together into sets, labeling the sets; and save the deconstructed sub-system set graph to the memory.
 11. The building automation device of claim 10, wherein said sub-system sets may be classified as either synchronous or asynchronous.
 12. The building automation device of claim 10, wherein said sub-system sets may be labeled with control precedence.
 13. The equipment sets of claim 10, wherein said sub-system sets may form unions between said sub-system sets whereby one or more piece of equipment is shared between multiple sets.
 14. The building automation device of claim 10, wherein said deconstructed sub-system sets graph may comprise the static equipment state information to produce the required routing path.
 15. The equipment sets of claim 10, wherein said sub-system sets may form unions between said sub-system sets whereby one or more piece of equipment is shared between multiple sets.
 16. A method comprising: receiving a user input to display one or more objects in a graphical user interface that enables a user to add graphic objects representing equipment to a graphical representation of a building automation system; and receiving a user input in a graphical user interface, that enables a user to interconnect the graphic objects into a system graph; and using a processor to process the system graph, as to identify the sub-systems of the graph that have a unique routing path, and are able to be actuated; and generating new graph of the processed sub-system sets deconstructed from the system graph.
 17. The method of claim 16, whereby said equipment may be classed individually as a source, a sink, or a transport, wherein: said source is comprised of a least one resource source; and said sink is comprised of a least one resource sink; and said transport is comprised of a least one means of resource transport; and wherein said transport is interposed between said source and said sink, such that it forms a sub-system that may be actuated.
 18. The method of claim 16, wherein the deconstructed sub-systems are semantically labeled from one or more of: the graphical user interface namespace; the sub-systems source, sink, or transport; or a set of rules thereof.
 19. The method of claim 16, wherein the deconstructed sub-systems are semantically labeled and grouped from the constituent object sets such that the graphical interface may provide automated analytics or graphs from those semantics.
 20. The method of claim 16, wherein said sub-system sets may be classified as either synchronous or asynchronous.
 21. The method of claim 16, wherein said sub-system sets may be automatically ranked by control precedence, priority, or other ranking system.
 22. The method of claim 16, wherein said sub-system sets may form unions between said sub-system sets whereby one or more piece of equipment is shared between multiple sets. 